Orthodoxy by Gilbert K. Chesterton

VI--The Paradoxes of Christianity

THE real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable
world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is
that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet
it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and
regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden;
its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose
some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he
would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate.
A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having
noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the
right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the
same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin
nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law;
and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was
another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he
would be wrong.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element
in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or
an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round
after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some
simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the
blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn't. Everywhere in
things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the
rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve
of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved.
It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have
a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to
find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat country. Scientific men
are also still organizing expeditions to find a man's heart; and when they try
to find it, they generally get on the wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these
hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician from the moon saw the
two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two
halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man's heart was in the right
place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is
exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not
merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes
illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes
right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the
things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the
unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the
subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though
all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It
is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we
feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that
there is something odd in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed
cannot be believed in our age. Of course, anything can be believed in any age.
But, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed
at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one.
If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons
for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more complicated
seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in
the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident. But if
snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one
might call it a miracle. It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since
come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern
world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain
problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill and Battersea that I
began to see that Christianity was true. This is why the faith has that
elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire
Christianity without believing in it. When once one believes in a creed, one is
proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science.
It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a
compliment to say that it's elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a
stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key
fits a lock, you know it is the right key.

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I
now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a
man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively
easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he
has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is
not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something
proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.
And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more
bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an
ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer
civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object,
and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase . . .
and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen." The
whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so
many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply
overwhelming makes reply impossible.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.
The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action. And this
hesitation chiefly arises, oddly enough, from an indifference about where one
should begin. All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never
get there. In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction I confess
that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing as another; I would
begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab. But if I am to be at all careful
about making my meaning clear, it will, I think, be wiser to continue the
current arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of
these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. All I had hitherto heard
of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of
twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I cannot understand
any one passing the age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a
question. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a
great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly
regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He
had an advantage over some of His modern critics. I read the scientific and
sceptical literature of my time -- all of it, at least, that I could find
written in English and lying about; and I read nothing else; I mean I read
nothing else on any other note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also
read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but I did
not know this at the time. I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read
as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh
who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild
doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom
Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine
horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use
whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting
(for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the
last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke
across my mind, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." I was in a
desperate way.

This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own
might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all
the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to
Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my
mind -- the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing.
For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it
had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent
with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory
reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the
east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to
the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive
squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and
sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I
will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in
the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as
a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the
unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather
agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere.
But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and
opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul's Cathedral. But
the extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my
complete satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in
Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic.
One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears
and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another
accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them
in a pink-and-white nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature was not
beautiful enough, and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic
objected that Christian optimism, "the garment of make-believe woven by pious
hands," hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible
to be free. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare
before another began to call it a fool's paradise. This puzzled me; the charges
seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a
white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the
Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to
it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human
vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and
rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all
young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of
the creed --

But when I read the same poet's accounts of paganism (as in "Atalanta"), I
gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean
breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract,
that life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened
it. The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a
pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did for one wild
moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of
the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither
one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were
false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be
something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have
these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man
might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd
shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian
religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against
Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and
unmanly about all that is called "Christian," especially in its attitude
towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the nineteenth century
were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way,
were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something
weak and over patient about Christian counsels. The Gospel paradox about the
other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made
plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too
like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I
should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned
the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I
found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for
fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars.
Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with
the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with
him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human
history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very
people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the
monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and
valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or
other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de
Leon did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians;
and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian
crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade
war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one
could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always
fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this
monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every
instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real
objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is
simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very
different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one
thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically
stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I
was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies -- I
mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity
rounded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said,
divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest
and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense.
It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing "Thou
shalt not steal." It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most
primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be "Little boys should
tell the truth." I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the
possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still -- with other things. And I
was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that
whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and
reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who
said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who
said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age
was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed
none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their
universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men's
universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean
round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of
savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the
light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also
found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress
were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the
dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to
themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their
relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic,
we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic
or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had.
We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We
must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed
in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad
enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat
Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people
were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting
themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. I can give no further space to
this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly
selected three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus,
certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack
on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the
cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then, other sceptics
(slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing
the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their
homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation. The charge
was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the
marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman's
intellect. But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for
woman's intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent
that "only women" went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with its
naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute
Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines
of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for
being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining
sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained
it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability
and of religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic
pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, "One thinks one
thing, and one another," and rebuked also for its union, "It is difference of
opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs." In the same
conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for
despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not
conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that
if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might
be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary.
There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There
are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad
contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too
thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the
enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly
optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite
supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of
such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their
eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me
no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to
the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the
infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is
really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The
only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity
did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not
Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt.
There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an
unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some
men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some
lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One
explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd
shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape.
Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him
to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently
filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond
the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow)
called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps
(in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the
normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane
and all its critics that are mad -- in various ways. I tested this idea by
asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that
might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a
lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged
Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it
was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily
luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought
Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was
really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in
such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where
modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where
modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was
mad on entrées. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of
preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the
matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there
was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrées, not
in the bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far. The fact that
Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and yet more irritated
at their happiness was easily explained. It was no longer a complication of
diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in Swinburne. The
restraints of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist than
a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered him because he was
more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by
instinct attacked Christianity; not because there is anything especially
anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little
anti-human about Malthusianism.

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely
sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis
and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial
criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise,
but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and
respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other;
still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek
beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this point of the speculation that I
remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide. In that matter there
had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow
amounted to sanity. This was just such another contradiction; and this I had
already found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which
sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right. Madly as
Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these
passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity.
Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and
I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our
theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the
pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the
top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in
relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this
combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has
specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an
elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things
at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace
this notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be
mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed
appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy
the u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] or balance of Aristotle. They
seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating
larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of
the u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] remains for all thinking men,
and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that
we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of
how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to
solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a
very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in
a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they
were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold
simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the
suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the
brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost
a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a
readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not
a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice
for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill
book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or
quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will
risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A
soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a
strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not
merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He
must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not
escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he
must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I
fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I
certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the
limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the
distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the
banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of
death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to
ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still
crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of
the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like
the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but
not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that
his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would
walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air.
This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted
against the compromise between optimism and pessimism -- the "resignation" of
Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things;
neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This
proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go
clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist
modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it
does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child,
who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see
marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it
loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble.
Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.

It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was
to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be
humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of
creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that
had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his
whole destiny -- all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of
Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry
of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was
a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the
brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The
Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man
was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought
of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun
and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about
the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and
fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of
St. Bernard. When one came to think of one's self, there was vista and
void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the
realistic gentleman could let himself go -- as long as he let himself go at
himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say
anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being;
let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is
Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not
say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. Here, again in short,
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping
them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both
points. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too
much of one's soul.

Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly
uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like
modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things
-- pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask
ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel
about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A
sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and
some one couldn't: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who
betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed.
In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is
rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a
pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent.
And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the
whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It
came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided
the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times
seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who
stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more
angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There
was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered
Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order,
the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they
require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and
political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel
everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling
at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to
feel home limits he has ceased to feel the "Odyssey." He is free from national
prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside
"Henry V." Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of
a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it
makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked
out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal
sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It
is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a
prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city. I am free from
Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no
means free of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine
emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong?
This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel
passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the
revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry,
could be loosened like cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt
Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than
Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place.
The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the
march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he
must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he
chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the
fight hopeless. So it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with
protest, and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not
only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more,
allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible
only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic
Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de théatre of
morality -- things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The
spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms,
ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and
greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the
official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be
acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has
entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade
themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write
reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any
eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse
before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly against
the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller, or any
modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.

Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing but
darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the faith. It
is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and
emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for
having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by
side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the
shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that
combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers.
It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty
gray. In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized
in the statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour.
All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought
in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a
mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk
is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-Christians
about submission and slaughter. It is true that the Church told some men
to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought
were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this
simply means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its
Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many
good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be some good in the
idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All
that the Church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good
things from ousting the other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans,
having all the scruples of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a
club instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy says; they poured
out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge.
But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run the whole world; and in
the ages of faith they were not allowed to run it. The world did not lose the
last charge of Sir James Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes
this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture;
the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis,
the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly
interpreted. It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies,
that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that
is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply
the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real
problem is -- Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal
ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the
miracle she achieved.

This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life. This is
knowing that a man's heart is to the left and not in the middle. This is
knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is flat.
Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the
law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that
it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But
to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe -- that was to
anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for
a big sin as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be
neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may
be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy -- that was a
discovery in psychology. Any one might say, "Neither swagger nor grovel"; and
it would have been a limit. But to say, "Here you can swagger and there you can
grovel" -- that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance.
Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with
symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which,
though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated
excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand
years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all
necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every
buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced.
Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be
said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while
the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at
least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and
the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was
not always in one man's body as in Becket's; the balance was often distributed
over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the
Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities;
and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink
cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so
much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just
as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If
any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact
that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into
individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate
balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan
empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let
the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and
swift." But the instinct of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow
and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental.
We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany
shall correct the insanity called France."

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so
inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean
the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion
about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is
everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a
hair's breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring
experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful
and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the
Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible
ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a
false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in
specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth
through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of
sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need
but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest
link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of
ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of
these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough
to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might
be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of
symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the
definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or
break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits,
even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to
be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish
habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There
never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and
to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man
behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in
every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The
Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is
utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a
vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid
enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed
by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant
she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too
unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the
conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been
easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been
easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit
of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is
always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's
own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have
fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion
after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom --
that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an
infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have
fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would
indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one
whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering
through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth
reeling but erect.